Time Thieves

down from the house in response to his berserker spell, but he saw that she was not there. He looked about the periphery of the clearing, and he moved just swiftly enough to see the mountain laurel rustle to his right, as if someone had parted it slightly in order to look at him and had dropped back out of sight as soon as he had begun to turn his head in that direction.
        
        Paranoia. He couldn't give in to it. There was nothing there; he had not seen anything at all.
        
        But before he could convince himself of that, he heard the footsteps of someone moving stealthily away through the weeds farther down the slope. Twigs snapped, and the sound of thorns snagging clothing and ripping free was also clearly audible.
        
        He stood and tried to see that way. The laurel grew taller there in the flush of a spring that flowed through the culvert beneath the road. He could see nothing but the swaying of brush as someone forced a way through. Abruptly, even that stopped.
        
        “Hey!” he called.
        
        There was no answer.
        
        He pushed into the brush. In moments, he found signs of the watcher's passage: broken grass stems, snapped laurel branches, disturbed earth where the sod had been shredded, as if the watcher had weighed a great deal or had, more likely, been wearing climbing boots with spiked soles.
        
        He ran faster, his breath still short from his workout with the sickle. He felt as if he were gaining on his quarry, and he was trying to think what to do when he saw the man-when fingers grasped the right hip of his jeans and brought him to a halt.
        
        He whirled, a hoarse cry caught in the back of his throat.
        
        What was there? No eyes, split mouth, staring out of darkness at him…?
        
        He fisted his hands and flailed out as he came around, but he found that there were no fingers, after all. Instead, long thorns snagged his belt and jeans. In a moment, he had freed himself, whimpering uncontrollably, and ran on.
        
        The signs of the watcher's passage ended in an un-breached wall of vegetation. Pete cautiously examined the land on all sides, but he could find no hiding place. He pushed on toward the highway, scratching himself on the thorns, catching small, brown burrs in his jeans. He found no one when he was in the clear. He crossed the road and looked down the second shelf of the mountain's slope. Nothing. It was as if the watcher had vanished in the middle of the woods.
        
        He headed back to the cabin. Della came out the front door as he started up the porch steps, almost colliding with him. “There's something here I want you to see,” she said. She seemed preoccupied, and she did not notice his condition.
        
        Inside, she took him to the bathroom door and pointed to the living room wall near the doorway where she had accidentally bumped a carton of floor tiles against the newly painted section. There was a scar on the beige paint which allowed the plaster to show through.
        
        “Don't worry about it,” he said. “I can touch it up when-”
        
        “It's not that,” she interrupted. “Don't you see why it scraped so easily? Touch it, Pete.” She was frightened, though he could not see why. Her normally rosy complexion had grown chalky.
        
        He ran his fingers across the scar and found moisture. There was damp paint on his fingertips. The surface had solidified and seemed dry, but its true nature could be betrayed by a thumbnail. It was not completely set.
        
        “How long does it take the stuff to dry, Pete?”
        
        He looked at her, then looked back at the wall. His head felt loose. It would fall off any minute and roll across the floor. He scratched the back of his neck, but that made him shiver, and he stopped.
        
        “Six hours,” he said at last.
        
        “Which means you might not have been up here at all that Thursday. This had to be painted last night, while you were home sleeping-by someone who wanted us to think that you'd been here that day.”
        
        “Why?” he asked.
        
        Neither of them had an answer.
        
        He tried three other places around that half of the room and found the same thing every time.
        
        His legs felt weak, and his spine seemed to shiver, but at least he was